


Playing Games, Backward

by vocativecomma



Category: Original Fiction - Fandom
Genre: Consent Issues, Meta, Poetry, hurt-comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 16:33:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vocativecomma/pseuds/vocativecomma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A cautionary tale for lovers of hurt-comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Playing Games, Backward

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Game Theory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/915296) by [not_poignant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_poignant/pseuds/not_poignant). 



> Thanks to Not_Poignant for the Inspiration.
> 
> An audio version of this can  
> be found [here](http://soundcloud.com/tasha-chemel/playing-games-backward)

Playing Games, Backward

1\. There are boxes of poems growing stale on the grocery shelves of my head, because if I wrote them, the urge to share them with you would be too large to contain. I tell the women in my writing class that my sharing is like an addiction. My teacher says that I should read something else, that my time is almost up, that I have other things to write about. I feel choked by the curl of her impatience, and suddenly wonder if I’m like the other addicts she works with. Ensnaring ourselves in metaphor so that we can justify our next fix. But it is a false wondering; I know my own truth. My need to share my poems (tucking them tenderly into the doorways of your favorite places) has nothing to do with absence, and everything to do with your shattered presence.

2\. I see you sometimes. The images are clearer than dream-images, but they are so ornately random that I doubt my own ability to paint them. Mostly, your wrists are strapped to a contraption that is some kind of demented combination of medical device, exercise equipment, and violin. There is always a man with a knife. Afterwards, there are bandages. Your face is always in shadow; I never can tell if you wish for him to stop, so I worry for you.

If we were still speaking, you might accuse me of perpetrating yet another intrusion; and I would say quietly that the images came to me of their own accord. That would be a fractioned truth. I seldom ask for them; but when they come, I relish the closeness they afford, the fleeting validation of my sanity. I am not the only one contending with this bond. I am not the only one playing this game. 

3\. Someone once told me that trauma happens when we are asked, over and over, to bend in an impossible direction. Catharsis has failed. Therapy was an exercise in futility. 

4\. You have called me many names: rapist, victim, stalker. Your words lodge like glass shards in my fingertips; my bones only ache at certain times, like an arthritic old man’s. 

5\. Hurt-comfort fics are warm fluffy bathrobes for the down-trodden and the vulnerable. That is why we both love to read them. But I have swaddled myself with so many, I have forgotten that their premises are incompatible with life. Rape cannot be beautiful. 

6\. I have never understood why someone so skilled with words could be so terrified of her pen. 

7\. The torturer-heros in our stories have their own bizarre leather-bound code for drawing the light from those they have broken. I have tried almost every technique in that code, and I will not deny that I have enjoyed most of them. 

I have stripped myself down to my nakedness so that I could become an even more sympathetic villain. I have exposed old wounds (my blindness, my dead father) and I only prettied them up a little bit. I have knelt; I have pleaded; I have begged. And when I made myself appear as weak as possible, and still you did not join me, I dredged up what I had no right to touch, and I spoke in what I thought was your pain’s poem-voice. In my confusion, I failed to remember what powerful weapons silence and indifference and blank pages can be. 

8\. After that most recent bout, you blocked all the entrances. But there is one last door, left partway open, one last page left unread.

Likeness breeds likeness. 

I am showing you my depravity.


End file.
